How can you blame the full moon? Actually not a bad idea, but as we ALL “know” human-induced global warming caused it because it was too large to have been produced by fracking. I think the fracking limit is 5.6, according to the “experts”. Some silly notion of plate tectonics and the associated stresses can not possibly play a role in creating earthquakes, probably because there is no way to increase taxes.

jlwallach
Is that a challenge thrown down to the dollar-needy kleptocrats of this world?

I imagine they will be able to find ways of taxing almost anything.
I may not have the imagination – but, in pursuit of profit to upgrade them from mere multi-billionaire status to trillionaires, a way will be found.
Greed is a powerful motivator!

Which demonstrates, yet again, that—far from exaggerating the sequelae of BAU emissions, as denihilists vocally allege—the scientific community has systematically underpredicted the impacts in store for us.

Brad. just checking that I understand your line of reasoning:
1. The climate community (whoever that is) makes predictions;
2. They did NOT predict this earthquake; and
3. This establishes a pattern of underpredicting what’s in store.

that may be too simplistic a question, believe today’s latest scientists.

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

There are some things science can’t say for sure. It’s a lesson climate scientists are gearing up to teach us yet again, in a nationwide education blitz on radio and TV, following news of a devastating tremor off the coast of Mexico.

Science, they will say, is not about 100% proof—a concept that belongs properly to mathematics and winemaking—and this means the understandable popular desire for definitive answers may never be satisfied.

We simply can’t know to a certainty whether our combustion of fossil fuels is the cause of any specific, given seismic event—or whether it was simply due to fracking—explained Prof Will Steffen on ABC Radio this morning, minutes after initial reports of Mexico’s tragedy.

Climate scientists are more careful than anyone to avoid jumping to conclusions, added Prof Steffen.

“We would never call [the Mexican earthquake and tsunami] a ‘result of climate change.'”

Steffen and his colleagues at the ANU prefer the term ‘the face of climate change,’ he said. While it was understandable that people seek to blame today’s humanitarian tragedy on carbon polluters, scientists are quick to urge agnosticism.

“This may not actually be due to climate change at all,” said the popular former Climate Commissioner. “Just because it’s what climate change looks like, let’s not jump to fallacies [sic].”

Apologies for addressing my comment to “Rhonda.” By the rules of ClimateBall, I now stand fatally discredited by my typo, and you not only can, but must ignore any further claims by me, even if they’re not by me but just by an SMH journalist I’m quoting. I must now retire to my cell to mortify my flesh in penance.

“Climate scientists are more careful than anyone to avoid jumping to conclusions, added Prof Steffen.”

What planet is this guy living on? The only thing climate scientists do is jump to conclusions and attack anyone who questions them. They will take any disaster or tragedy and immediate try to blame it on climate change. Rather than have sympathy for the victims of these events, they step over their dead bodies to promote their propaganda.

The issue is likely fracking – as fracking in Mexico has increased over the past years, seismic activity has increased along with it. We’ve seen the same thing in the US, most notably in Oklahoma. Humans are morons who have decided to place money over building a sustainable infrastructure, and we are going to pay for it.

Now that’s funny. Just because you and your friends talk a lot about nonsense, isn’t proof that the nonsense is real.
Actual science shows that there is no connection between earthquakes and frakking. Actual science shows that it is impossible for frakking to cause earthquakes.

I don’t claim to be an expert, but wouldn’t increasing seismological activity affect fault lines in general, even those off shore? To clarify, I’m not claiming that this earthquake in particular was directly caused by fracking – but that fracking is increasing seismological activity in and around Mexico, and so is more likely to be a factor than climate change or the moon as others suggest. But like I said, I’m not a seismologist, so I certainly could be mistaken.

I see that below Goody Weaver cites NPR as a source on fracking. This is like citing Hillary Clinton on the 2016 election. NPR is as steadfastly left-wing as possible and would try its best to find (or fabricate) evidence that fracking is BAD! Seeing NPR as your source is as good as saying “Disregard, please!” If any organization has gone out of its way to politicize every possible topic (from a leftist viewpoint), it’s NPR.

TO CLARIFY. I am not “citing NPR” as proof of anything. I posted the NPR article to demonstrate that this information has been out in the public for several years. The scientists quoted in the article don’t work for NPR. And I’m at work, so not inclined to sift through professional journals to find an article that would pass an online forum’s “purity test.” My point here is simply that I think increased seismological activity (which actual scientists have indicated for several years is likely linked to fracking) is more likely to influence earthquakes than climate change. I could certainly be wrong. I doubt we’ll fully understand the effects of climate change until it’s far too late. But considering that the US Geological Survey and the EPA are both examining the link between fracking and earthquakes, I don’t think one needs to be “brainwashed” to discuss the issue. But whatever.

Do you even read your “sources”? It’s clear that you don’t think about them afterwards, even if you do read them.

The PBS hatchet job itself notes that, “Most of the tremors studied by Eaton and Bao’s team were too small to cause damage in the sparsely populated area. One incident registered 4.6 magnitude, though it happened after fracking and wastewater disposal had occurred.”

Thus, if fracking alone does cause quakes, they are small and localized to the immediate area of drilling operations.

Explain please then how, on your planet, it is possible for fracking to cause a Magnitude 8.0 earthquake far out to sea and deep in the earth’s crust?

Goody, the quake origin was freak’n 35 KILOMETERS DOWN!!! Nobody is doing anything to affect the earth’s crust at that depth. The deepest anyone has drilled is 12 kilometers by the Russians on the Kola peninsula, thousands of kilometers away from the quake origin. Your tin-foil hat is too tight.

It’s just weird how production on the East coast of Mexico causes earthquakes on the West Coast. It just seems like people read one or two sentences in any given article and then decide to make up the rest of the story.

There’s a big difference between fracking earthquakes and Tectonic Earthquakes. One relieves minor stresses and causes no damage and the other is the result of major stress caused mostly by plate tectonics.
It could be argued that relieving stress in small localized quakes by fracking prevents major quakes.
The only real issue of fracking causing environmental problems that I know of is sand mining disturbing the people affected by that mining.

“Opposite fluxes lead to rearrangement of field lines building up magnetic stress up to a breaking point where magnetic energy is released in a flare via magnetic reconnections. The observed temporal clustering of Fig. 4 shows that the rate of flare occurrence decreases in time as a power law after a ”mainflare”. Since the same behaviour is found for seismic sequences, here we propose that the mechanism at the basis of seismic energy redistribution can be responsible for ”afterflare” occurrence. In particular magnetic stress transfer in Solar Corona plays the role of elastic stress redistribution on the Earth crust”

“It has been determined that in the period of solar activity increase (11-year cycles) there increase seismic and volcanic activities in the compression zone of Earth and at the same time there decreases the activity in the tension zones of Earth. On the basis of the discovered stable 11-year and 22-year cyclicalities in the seismic and volcanic activities and their high correlation with solar activity there has been made the long-term forecast until 2018. The next maximum of seismic and volcanic activity with very high amplitude for the compression zones of Earth is forecasted for the period 2012-2015.”

About four hours before the quake struck a strongest electromagnetic pulse in the recent years was recorded by ground magnetometers, amounting to about 2.5% of the total Earth’s field strength, shifting declination by more than 8 degrees, while KP index went to 8 (I can’t remember seeing before) for about 6 hours
This is first time I’ve seen Z pulse over 1000nT. Last night’s impulse of 1200-1300nT dwarfs the Fukushima’s geomagnetic impulse of about 400nT, while this one lasted only one hour or so, the geomagnetic disturbance on 11 March 2011 lasted more than six hours.
I’m not certain about whales’ migration calendars, if some were in the polar regions on the move and get beached in the next few weeks it may be a bit more than just a coincidence.

Another ‘coincidence’ was the Christchurch (N.Z.) earthquake in Feb 2011 (when nearly 200 people were killed and thousands injured)

Link between the occurrence of earthquakes and geomagnetic storms is unlikely to be proved any time soon; earthquakes of various magnitudes occur very frequently, but large geomagnetic storms are rare, thus establishing any meaningful correlation is near impossible.
If there is more to it than just a coincidence what is physical mechanism that could be postulated?
Few years back I proposed hypothesis of ‘the lithosphere stress point failure due to the solar storms electromagnetic induction’
It is likely that in the electrical terms any tectonic fault is also the weakest point in the global electric circuit.

I do not know if there is any connection , but earthquakes on dry land have anecdotally been accompanied by air glows. I have presumed this glow to be luminescence arising from electrons injected as a result of piezoelectic effects especially in rocks with a high content of quartz.
Could a sufficiently strong electromagnetic pulse act on rocks with minerals without a centre of symmetry (piezoelectric crystals) , to cause a very slight deformation sufficient to trigger a seismic event in strata that are already highly stressed by tectonic flow?

There is strong evidence of electromagnetic processes responsible for earthquake triggering, that we study extensively. We will focus here on one correlation between power in solar wind compressional fluctuations and power in magnetospheric pulsations and ground H component fluctuations. The variation of the horizontal component H of the geomagnetic field is the crucial parameter in the Magneto-Seismic Effect MSE to be discussed in a companion paper. The connection of earthquake activity to possible solar or solar wind drivers is not well understood; many authors have attempted correlations in the past with mixed results.
Geophysical Research Abstracts,Vol.8,01705, 2006;Lab for Solar and Space Physics, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center,Greenbelt, MD http://www.cosis.net/abstracts/EGU06/01705/EGU06-J-01705.pdf

Scientists have been tracking and studying substorms for more than a century, yet these phenomena remained mostly unknown until THEMIS went into action. Even more impressive was the substorm’s power. Angelopoulos estimates the total energy of the two-hour event at five hundred thousand billion ( 5 x 10^14 ) Joules. That’s approximately equivalent to the energy of a magnitude 5.5 earthquake http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2007/11dec_themis/

mikewaite September 8, 2017 at 3:54 am ‘air glow’. Perhaps a connection to the post Loma Prieta earthquake 1989. Popular Science article Stanford U. in California doing heavy construction – elevated roadway study with different material stress-crush factors repeated an earlier Japanese study and found similar results. When a block of granite was crushed, a sphere of negative (??) charged energy floated around until finding a grounding site.

“From retrospective analysis of historical data, we cannot confidently resolve a statistically significant relationship between solar-terrestrial variables and earthquake occurrence. Therefore, we cannot confidently reject the null hypothesis of no solar-terrestrial triggering of earthquakes. This does not mean, of course, that there is no such role—we just cannot detect its presence in historical data”

You have overstated the significance of the study.

It would be interesting to see if subsets of the earthquake counts used that accounts for the fault subtypes (e.g. compression zone) would be any different.

You have overstated the significance of the study
Not at all. The conclusion was that there is no evidence for any relationship, i.e. that any effect is in the noise. As the authors said: “insignificant triggering”.

“Not at all. The conclusion was that there is no evidence for any relationship”

I believe the point was the issue is open from a statistical perspective. Your first claim was that there was no relationship. On closer examination we find there’s been no evidence to accept the null hypothesis either.

I believe the point was the issue is open from a statistical perspective
No, there is no statistical significant relationship, so that issue is closed. Since there is no detectable signal, there is still the possibility that there is a relationship too weak to detect, which in my book is equivalent to no evidence of a link between earthquakes and geomagnetic storms.

“No, there is no statistical significant relationship, so that issue is closed.”

But Leif, certainly you accept the the world hasn’t had access to the sophisticated and increasingly sensitive instrumentation needed to establish a baseline data set until very recently? How can this question be resolved in your mind, if statistics are unable to categorically rule out the null hypothesis using existing methods, knowing full well that existing methods have existed for less than a century, and the phenomenon under investigation is typically measured in millennia?

using existing methods, knowing full well that existing methods have existed for less than a century, and the phenomenon under investigation is typically measured in millennia?>/i>

No, it is measured in hours and days.
We have good measurements of geomagnetic storms and of earthquakes for more than a century. There have been about 2700 storms the last 100+ years.We can use the well-defined start of a storm [a ‘sudden storm commencement – SSC] as a key time and count the number of strong earthquakes every day from a week before the storm to several months after the storm. The result is shown here:

using two different catalogs of earthquakes. There is no hint of more quakes before, on, or after the storm.

Yet, to the eye, there’s an apparent correlation? You’ve plotted the to variables together, but didn’t provide the results of a simple linear regression? What is the R²?
To the eye there is no correlation at all. There are not two ‘variables’. There are discrete, short [hours] rare events. Perhaps you don’t understand the nature of a ‘superposed epoch’ analysishttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superposed_epoch_analysis
There is no R^2 defined and no signal to be extracted.
Your mention of the phenomenon lasting millenea shows that you have no idea of what is going on.

“Your mention of the phenomenon lasting millenea shows that you have no idea of what is going on.”

And that would be my fault. Thanks Leif. For some reason I had the idea a Stanford Professor might be engaged in the practice of education rather than simply pissing on the head of someone asking for an explanation of their wild and crazy proclamations?

I’ve been reading your trash for a few years now and you just managed to pound a big nail in your own coffin. Thanks for playing.

might be engaged in the practice of education
Some people like you are obviously beyond education. I have shown by simple, straightforward analysis that there is no effect and linked to a paper that demonstrated that no signal above the noise was detected. That is what an educator does. That you respond with an insult tells us something about you [which we actually already knew].

I’d like to say at this point in the conversation that the person claiming to be “Leif Svalgaard” (lsvalgaard) on these pages clearly isn’t. This calls to question the true identities of just about anyone who travels these pages under a recognizable “name”.

I’m a member of ResearchGate. Leif has a page there, and an absurd looking portrait. Good luck with that…

My statements and arguments rest on their own merit. I make no claim to my own reputation. I argue truth and I have been known to laugh at a fart.

I’m a member of ResearchGate. Leif has a page there, and an absurd looking portrait
So am I, and I take offence to your comment on my looks. You could learn quite a lot about the ‘truth’ by paying attention to my posts and comments.

“Leif”, you need work on your presentation. I actually think I know what you’re trying to say with that graph you produced, unfortunately you didn’t say it and, when asked for clarification responded like a pompous ass, which is behavior I’ve seen you exhibit many times in the past.

If you can figure it out, everybody can. The graph is clear and convincing. It shows that there is no spike in occurrence of strong earthquakes from a week before to about three months after strong geomagnetic storms, based on more that 2000 storms covering the last hundred+ years. The graph has been shown and discussed in earlier WUWT posts.

What do I care what you can’t fathom or don’t buy. The figure was clear, the explanation was sufficient. That you don’t get it or don’t ‘buy it’, is your problem. There are people that no educator can reach. We can appeal to the rest of the readership: who did not grasp the figure? Let us see how many will confess to that. Who else believes [with you] that the phenomenon [geomagnetic storms influence on earthquakes] takes thousands of years to play out?

Don’t know if any Radio 4 listeners in UK have noticed but they are much keener on reporting Irma than this earthquake. I suspect their motives because they keep interviewing people who link the hurricane to global warming but obviously can’t do the same with the earthquake. Climate alarmism biassing reporting? Prove me wrong BBC.

lsvalgaard September 8, 2017 at 7:11 am
“There is no link between magnetic storms and earthquakes.

Hi Doc
you didn’t finish sentence, it should have been :
‘There is no link between magnetic storms and earthquakes as far as we know’

As I said: “Link between the occurrence of earthquakes and geomagnetic storms is unlikely to be proved any time soon; earthquakes of various magnitudes occur very frequently, but large geomagnetic storms are rare, thus establishing any meaningful correlation is near impossible.”

Do you have any data that might show KP at 8 since the measurements have started?
tnx

The full sentence should be: “the data we have show that there is no link between magnetic storms and earthquakes”. For example, we can plot the number of [strong] earthquakes the last 100+ years following geomagnetic storms [the Sudden Storm Commencements]:

We have had more than 2000 geomagnetic storms the past 100+ years and they do not show any significant effect [see my plot in these comments]. That is conclusive enough for me. What Love’s paper shows is that if there is a small effect, it is not detectable above the noise and therefore useless as a predictor.

THE PACIFIC TSUNAMI WARNING CENTER HAS ISSUED A TSUNAMI THREAT
MESSAGE FOR OTHER PARTS OF THE PACIFIC LOCATED CLOSER TO THE
EARTHQUAKE. HOWEVER… BASED ON ALL AVAILABLE DATA THERE IS NO
TSUNAMI THREAT TO HAWAII. REPEAT. BASED ON ALL AVAILABLE DATA
THERE IS NO TSUNAMI THREAT TO HAWAII.

THIS WILL BE THE FINAL STATEMENT ISSUED FOR THIS EVENT UNLESS
ADDITIONAL DATA ARE RECEIVED.

With 100% certainately, this earth quake, like all earth quakes, was caused 100% by Man’s use of fossil fuels. If we all stopped using fossil fuels, earth quakes and bad weather, would never occour again, ever. 100% of scientists agree. Anyone who has ever made use of goods and or services that involve the use of fossil fuels is 100% responsible for this earth quake, all past earth quakes, and all future earthquakes and all bad weather as well..